This was at one point my favorite dubstep song. This is also the first song that came up on Pandora when I put "Adventure Club" in as a channel, so I think it is a lot of people's favorite dubstep song. An aside about Pandora: I cannot think of a more frustrating activity than trying to get a Bluetooth connection in the morning when I am already running late between my phone, Pandora and my car. It's like, I am doing all the work and really trying to make this work but the individual parties are all steadfastly attempting to be disinterested. Which reminds me of some of the times when I was trying to book a studio for photography for Cyberganked. I would have these exchanges as the middleman between the studio owners that couldn't keep an accurate calendar and an actress that ever-changing availability. I was paying them both, mind you, and some times you just want to be like, "You two fucking figure it out, I'll be there." Which reminds me of Pandora, Bluetooth and my car. Which reminds me of Wait, by Adventure Club.

This is the only song I can remember where I liked the live version more than the studio version AND... ANNNnnd the live version is a billion times objectively better than the studio version. By the time Together Alone came out I was a Crowded House fan and that was the first one that I was actively waiting for and bought new. And it's a great album, probably their best aside from Woodface. And this song is on it as track 8 and it sounds nothing like what I linked above. I would love to know the story of how something so beige like the studio version can transform into something really haunting and beautiful like the live version. I mean, not enough to ask the members of the band as that would in some cases require a time machine and me not just going, "REEEEEEE!!!"

My family used to drive to Olean, NY for Thanksgiving each year. We would celebrate Christmas with my aunt and uncle. They didn't have kids of their own and we would do gift exchanging then. They spoiled the hell out of us, they were and are such good people and I can never live up to how nice they were to my brother and I. After I started at Syracuse I got into Queen and one year they got me the CD Queen II as a gift. I would bring my headphones anyway because we would listen to music on the drive down on our tape players or whatever, so I remember listening to this for the first time on Thanksgiving evening in 1993 or 1994.

Queen II is a good CD, though for the first 7 tracks it does not have the power of singles that a lot of the music they did later has. Track 8 is Nevermore which I had at #60 on my list. Track 9 is this fucking thing, possibly the most "Queen" song they ever did.

I love that at 4:42 in that video Roger Taylor sings a couple lines. If that isn't evidence that they were the most talented band in the world then I don't know what is. They have a guy playing drums for them that could have been on lead vocals for virtually every other band that came up in the 70s. And they'd bust him out once or twice an album as if they were showing off.

I have no idea what March of the Black Queen is about, really. I don't think it matters. I hope it blew the minds of people older than myself when they put this album on (it is the one with the four of them arranged in a diamond pattern) and people heard it for the first time just like it did me.

I was in Melissa's kitchen, her old place on Stout Street when the vet that we like told me that Boggit had feline lymphoma. The vet outlined three choices, although the third one was "do nothing" and that wasn't really a choice. He said that the deal was, we could try chemo for $8,000 - $10,000 in order to get an extra year of life, maybe, or we could try a combination of prednisone and chlorambucil and get more time that way. Certainly not a year, but some more time. I elected to do the latter. I had eight thousand dollars, which isn't meant to impress anyone. I had it. It's savings. It's meant to protect my family, right? What else am I saving it for?

"It's meant to protect my family."

The next day at work this song came on my Youtube playlist. It was already a song I listened to once a day. But its name ("Stay") and the fact that it is this remixed version of a very peppy song struck me and it became the song that I most associate with my cat dying. I listened to it at least a thousand times between when he was diagnosed and when he passed away.

I don't know if I said this on the blog part of the site, but I regret not spending the eight thousand dollars for a shot to keep Boggit alive for another year. Just between you and whoever is reading this, if Frobozz gets cancer I will be spending the money to get him on chemo. There is a story that I like about a guy in trouble. The guy prays to God for help. I forget the details and I am telling the story wrong, but throughout the night three people come to help the dude and he declines their help. He dies and asks God, "Did you not hear me? I begged and prayed for help!" And God' like, "I sent three dudes." Having a savings account is meant to protect the family.

There have been two days that I forgot to think about Boggit since he died. I wrote them down in an email that I haven't sent; it exists in my Gmail Drafts folder. I usually think of him as soon as I wake up. I usually think of him - if I hadn't so far - when Stay comes on at work. Sometimes there are some weekend days where so much is going on that I forget. Well, that's not true. There have been two and I hope there are no more. The way I figure it, there's a number of people who are undeniably important to me. My wife, my brother, my mother and father and then I start listing the pets. Not because a cat is more important than Flack or Ben or Roody or whatnot, but because they live with me, right? I try to tell myself that this is all perfectly normal because:

1) I had never seen someone suffer with cancer before
2) Boggit was the fifth or sixth most important creature in the history of my life because he lived with me and relied on me
3) Nobody had ever died on me, whose death I could have at least pushed off

There is a chance that he would have died by now even if I spent the money. There is a chance that he could have gotten out and been eaten by a fox, right? I knew, when I started to play this song on repeat for continuous eight-hour days except for meetings, that one day Boggit would be in my past instead of my present. It just came too quickly.

At least going forward, if this happens to any of the cats we won't go gently into that good night. You can fucking charge feline chemo.

Time for a bit of a palette cleanser! There is this tendency for pop punk drummers to think that hitting the snare on every beat is the kind of drumming that a pro would do, and not some dumbass kid that can't believe he's in a band. I immediately PAN any pop punk song that bangs the drums on every beat. This is the only song I have ever listened to that makes it work.

Bachelor Machines is the name of the band comprised of Caltrops member FullofKittens. FoK made an incredible amount of incredible electronica. I am truly gifted that we somehow got together on what has been a very silly site because I love his music. He has also been extremely encouraging, letting me use a lot of songs for the games that I have made over the years.

Every track on Phantoms, Acceptances's seminal album, but especially this one. I remember really, really getting into this song for the first time after I had finished Portal. I very rarely finish video games and I recall that the last hour of Portal had great music, there was then THAT SONG and I switched over to a bunch of MP3s that I had in rotation and this one came up. It was that magic week between Christmas and New Year's where the world just leaves you alone and you can play some video games and reflect on all the time you wasted/the fact that you didn't kill yourself. You know it goes!

It's also important to remember that this is the song they ended Phantoms on, which I realize doesn't impress any of you because none of you like this band, but for me, seeing what was the 29th best song ever being posted at the end of an already great album was pretty cool.

This has been going on for too long. Let's just focus and get through this one per day.

#27 To Be With You - Mr. Big

I enjoy the group vocals on this, plus this is one song I feel my band could actually play. They have another great song called Green Tinted Sixties Mind that would be in the 100-200 range if I had gone that far with the list.

I would characterize this song as a sort of "gateway" song, in so much as I bought The Great Radio Controversy because this song was on it, then realized how great Tesla was. For what they wanted to do, I don't know if anyone ever did it better. I have a friend that comes to Denver when the comedy glam rock band Steel Panther plays, so I've seen Steel Panther a couple times. Last time they were joined by special guest Frank Hannon, the guitarist. In a way this means I have seen Tesla, thank you. (Frank and Steel Panther did a cover of a Van Halen cover if I remember right. You Really Got Me or something. As with most nights we go to see Steel Panther, the memory is foggy.)

The third Crowded House song so far on my list. This song was on their album called Together Alone, which came out in 1993 when I was a sophomore in college. By this point they had already made three albums (Crowded House, Temple of Low Men and Woodface) that I would have had in my top ten both in 1993 and now. So it was probably inevitable that they weren't going to continue that forever - Together Alone is a good album (in fact, all three of the songs that I've listed so far are from it, now that I look back) but it's one of those that has 13 tracks when it would have been totally fine if it had 9 instead. If you know what I mean. A little filler, that's all.

I have a poor memory and I probably said these exact same things about Together Alone earlier in this thread. At any rate, having not ever seen them live is my biggest music regret.

This song was on some disc of theirs that wasn't a real album. B-sides and covers or something. Which is insane, it is in my opinion their best song by far and you have to actively go looking for it to know that it exists, or just hang around the web incarnation of a long forgotten dial-up BBS to get the low down.

I credit them for just having their lead singer, Jordan Pundik, sing the part of the song that the girl's character would say. That's pretty woke for the 2000s.

If I were making a list of songs that I feel were objectively the best ever made and would go to war with that list and eliminated my personal feelings from it completely, this would be waaaay up there. I realize you guys don't like the same music I do, but anyone who doesn't like this song has something wrong with them. I don't know anything factual about this song and I really hope that all the members of the Pixies have been interviewed about it properly BUT to me it seems like the perfect song that blended four unique minds together. Kim Deal singing the song's title towards the end would normally be the best part of any song that she did that in, but in this one it's like fourth or fifth. You have the bass starting this thing, which sounds immediately iconic. The drums are next and perfect throughout. When Black Francis or whoever does that thing at 0:36 (and I have no idea what they are saying and won't spoil this by looking it up) we're now in some alternate dimension of sound and after that Francis is screaming "Debaser" and more lyrics in the style of a closeup soul in torment. This song is the highlight of all collaboration, it's what you hope you get when people work together.

I don't know what the really rich do with their money, but man if I had the means I would get the guys together who did this and ask them to name their price to make ten more songs that sound like this. In researching this post I see that they did 4 more albums since Viva Emptiness and I suppose I will have to listen to each track to see if they went back to this haunting style. (And Viva Emptiness does pretty much sound like this throughout, making it one of my top ten albums, not that I have ranked them.)